108406-kings-and-bastards
Content ---- ---- The one thing I learned from being a developer is that the user never know what they want. You got to figure out what they need and provide it to them. | |} ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- Yeah because there is no such thing as raiding guilds. Everyone has downed soo by now at least in lfr which is all that counts. Hell I beat SoO the night it came out in a lfr. It is a baby game. | |} ---- ---- ---- Yet there' a bunch of people who want that. 40 man raids isn't for everyone, that is specific to the 1% of people who want the return of 40 man raids. I don't know what issue people have with it. If you don't want to do it, don't do it and let the people who want to do it continue having their fun. | |} ---- Sad but the only reason I clicked on it because I thought of GoT :( | |} ---- Actually, we flocked to WoW because it was a new MMO with much better graphics and it was based off an IP we loved. No one had any idea if it was a grind or not and none of us really cared because we expected a grind. That's what MMO's were at that time, grinds. It was really only after WoW that the grinding changed significantly. | |} ---- Perhaps the intent wasn't so much to placate the developers, and more to avoid a premature thread lock? Oh and the guy obviously loves the game and honestly wants to see it succeed. Just my guess. | |} ---- I agree with a lot of what you said. I'll say what I've always said about WildStar and let the people decide from there. The Best thing about WildStar is it's obvious you aren't playing WoW. The worst thing about WildStar is it's obvious you aren't playing WoW. At the end of the day Carbine will have to decide. "Too Hard" is not a problem if the intention is to have a very small very dedicated player base. I enjoy going back and forth with people like Lethality(seriously love the guy lol) and I disagree but to a certain degree a few of them are right to have a few misgivings about the current change to Attunement. The Design Philosophy becomes a lot less clear. On top of that they could be very well creating an issue down the line. Casuals and Semi-Hardcore(The forgotten ones aka how I identify) could indeed take that change as a potential shift in Philosophy. If they come to realize that it's not the case the backlash will be great. Carbine needs to define who WildStar is for. It's not the difficulty that's the issue. They could potentially survive on a dedicated few. I do agree that some design choices are *facepalm* magnets(oo look RNG..Again)... | |} ---- ---- ---- ---- Totally agreed, and gonna' go ahead and call a spade a spade... while probably ruffling quite a few feathers by throwing out some truth, at least in my perspective. Not saying this is the case with ALL that gloss over the obvious issues... but can't help but feel as though it's more of an "against the grain" kind of thing/mentality/standpoint. I mean honestly, see it all the time... hence why so many over-hyped former MMOs as WoW-killers and when they weren't the game crashed and burned. Honestly feel (and this isn't to defend WoW, as I haven't played it in over a year... though it's still a good game and has its own earned merit)... there's those that are so opposed to Blizzard and/or WoW that anything that comes along, even if it's (hypothetically) a bug-ridden indy-title that doesn't even launch right, it'll be hyped to be the next best thing. See it in several areas of media, and other bits in life, to be honest. Like on consoles, when the original Playstation was all the buzz... I knew some individuals that couldn't stand Sony and dodged the Playstation like the plague. Then when the original X-Box launched, they hopped all over it and hailed it as the second coming... no matter its issues and short-comings. See it in music... the "popular trends" that will get plastered everywhere... while others, somewhat due to differing tastes, will go against the grain and hop on any group that's "underground" or "not quite heard of" or the ones they can say, "I liked them first" (pretty sure there was even threads a bit ago where some were boasting, "we're making history" and "one day, ten years from now, we'll be able to say we played Vanilla Wildstar"). Think it's a spin-off of the whole "hipster mentality" to be honest... it's like "high school" went viral and infected the world... now the most important thing for most is to belong to a trend, declare that you're a king-of-the-mountain for that trend, and hop on the next coolest bandwagon as quickly as possible... that is until the bandwagon crashes into a tree... then you see everybody running in all directions faster then Forest Gump or a even an ant nest that's been obliterated. (Even see it regularly in MMOs for any that follow them regularly... almost like a real-life version of Q-Bert... people hopped to Guild Wars, Guild Wars 2, Rift, Tera, SWTOR, TSO, etc... proclaiming each and everyone to be "the next WoW-killer" and "the best thing since the original Everquest or Vanilla WoW"... and oddly, when they crash and burn, same individuals end up in the next MMO down the line saying the same, "best thing since original Everquest or Vanilla WoW" typically denying that they were ever any part of the over-hype to the previous title they hopped on like a pogo-stick with a force-feedback rocket-pack). :D PS - As for the bolded and underlined part (in the quote)... AMEN! As the saying goes, "those that don't learn from their history will be doomed to repeat it". B) | |} ---- 'A bunch of people'. Who are these people, and where are they? And are there enough of them to warrant spending dev time building specifically for it? How many 40 man raids have actually been attempted in Wildstar so far, much less completed? Why not design raiding so that it scales with how many people you bring? The issue is that in Wildstar, if you're not gearing up towards 40 man raids, what other options do you have to continue progression? What if you only have 30 dedicated people? What if you really WANT to experience that content, but your server can't support 40 people in the right roles all at the same time of day, with enough of a window to actually progress? Like I said, there are many good reasons why 40 man raiding is a bad idea, both from a player and a development perspective. It's too much effort for too little gain. If you want a reason why people have a problem with it, there it is. If people are so afraid of their opinions and critiques of the game being locked and deleted that they're willing to gloss over obvious flaws with the game, then Wildstar really is doomed. It's one thing to lock a thread of someone who's raging and ranting without intelligence. It's another thing to lock and delete honest, objective, and well-written posts. I don't think we're at that stage yet, so why did the original article avoid the issues? Also, I don't know if I 'love' the game any more, but I do want to see it succeed. Competition and diversity in the genre is good for everyone, players and developers alike. But that's also why I'm so critical of it. The genre doesn't need another clone. VERY well put. :) It's perfectly ok for a game to have it's own identity. However, it's NOT ok to ignore what WoW is doing right, just because you don't want to be WoW. I made a similar point in another thread. Attunements are fine, as long as the steps of the attunement are actually leading up to the content you're trying to access. It needs to be relevant, and it should also prepare you for the next step in the progression process. Grinding reputation has nothing what so ever to do with the skills involved in raiding. The fact that I killed over nine thousand boars in order to make the Saiyan faction like me doesn't in any way prepare me for the challenges presented in a raid environment. A step in the attunement process where I have to kill world boses makes sense, since it requires some level of organization and coordination between large groups of players. Doing dungeons makes sense as well, because it gets you accustomed to more advanced interrupts and telegraphs. Timers on silver runs do NOT make sense, since it's been clearly outlined that there are no such timers in raids. So why is the attunment process so chalked full of useless steps that have nothing to do with raiding? As MANY thousands of players have already said: Tedium is not a good form of challenge! | |} ---- ---- If you only have 30 then 40-man isn't for you. It doesn't hurt to make a little bit of content for people who can and want to do 40-man. That was one of the big things that brought people to WildStar in the first place, they want the 40-man and they're working towards it. It's content for the very large successful guilds, if you really want to do 40-man, you better join a large successful guild or have the ability to create one. Not all the content have to be for everyone, they can give something for the 1% crowd. | |} ---- Yes, but the problem arises when a great deal of the development time is spent on 1% or less of the people, and other parts of the game suffer as a result. It's perfectly fine to have high-end, challenging content designed for the top 1%. But only if it doesn't result in a detriment to the game AS A WHOLE. And that's where Carbine seems to be failing. They're so focused on using an outdated model for end-game, that they've failed to realize that the community has mostly moved away from such a setup. If they're willing and able to support such a small niche of the market, then good for them, I guess. I think it's a terrible move, but if that's where they want to take Wildstar, then I hope they're well-prepared for the impact such a decision will have on their game. | |} ---- ---- tell me a single MMO that - is grind free - is RNG free - had players or income The normal rule is - you can't make content at the speed that the player consumes it. So for player to consume it slower you'll either need to put in heavy time gating (GW2 with one dungeon path a day, 1 boss down a day, etc) or make the content grindable (RNG drops). And no-one will ever make a WoW out of the box anymore. It would take too many people, too many funds and bug testing with such an ammount of content would be impossible. Now about the mistakes, if everyone learned from WoW's mistakes all we would have would be WoW clones. The Industry needs variety. Mixed questing types, mixed PVP types, mixed game modes. When it's varied the consumer has enough choice to find something to satisfy them. | |} ---- Also, they're focusing development time on raids? Which one was that raid drop that I missed again? | |} ---- Launch. | |} ---- so if they took out all the raiding, but launched like half a year earlier, then what would have happened? Why would anyone even argue that what they like should be prioritized over anything else in the game? What if the game launched with no PvP? Surely PVE content would be better and there would be more of it! What if the game didn't have any housing? Maybe I could get an extra dungeon then! The point is that raiders were pretty much abandoned. The last two drops and the upcomming drop is not raid content. So how is it stealing development time? | |} ---- Why obsess with keeping up with the rate that people consume content? Why not create a game that is fun to PLAY, and let that be the draw? Games such as EVE online do this by placing most of the burden of content on the players, and seems to be doing quite well. Games such as LOL and DOTA2 have almost no content, relatively speaking, and yet still manage to be excessively poplar. Games where you can repeat content in different ways, such as DDO also do very well for themselves. The idea of placing treadmill mechanics in a game as a staple of the genre is just bad. Your game doesn't have what it takes to stand on it's own, so you fill it will repetitive bullshit to prop it up, and place a carrot at the end in the hopes that people will focus on that instead of your weak design. This is the opposite of good. Learning from mistakes does not mean simply copying a good idea straight across. It means taking an idea that was originally good, and stepping it up a notch. But I agree with you that there needs to be variety. Players value the ability to choose their playstyle. What the do not like is having their time and effort wasted. | |} ---- 1. EVE is very very grindy. If you want any kind of ship that would hold in battle you're going to spend years (yes, years) grinding it out. And then it's horribly OP. One guy spent about 5 years saving in EVE and bought a ship that 40 000 people couldn't bring down for hours. 2. LoL and DOTA2 are mobas. A completely different genre. And even then a moba loses its customers without adding new heroes and it loses income without adding new skins. 3. No MMO has what it takes to stand on its own. Go to WoW forums. Even there you'll find "not enough content". That's why WoW tends to lose subs for half a year at a time sometimes. People consume the now casual content and move on. Look at GW2, due to a temporary approach to the game it got very little permanent content and the players simply left. And then every single MMO even limits what you can do in a day. I'm very very glad that here it isn't limited. Now games that can sort of stand on their own - sandbox MMOs. But those are a completely different genre. | |} ---- ---- ---- | |} ---- Apparently it hates colored text and nested quotes as much as I do. Just to chime in, I think you'll find a pointed lack of RNG and grinding in Bioware RPGs. Jade Empire, Mass Effect.. Dragon Age probably had some? Couldn't get invested in Yet Another D&D Campaign In the Kingdom of Grayandbrown. But the point, generally, stands... there are RPGs that divested themselves of these 'inescapable qualities of the genre' and did pretty well for themselves. | |} ---- ---- That kind of depends on what you consider grinding. Most people consider it repeating the same content, what varies is how often does one think one needs to repeat it to start grinding. For example Mass Effect 1, most of the visitable random planets and even some main mission planets would have gameplay that's very alike and even building structures that would barely change. So no matter the story you would always be walking into the same kind of rooms, killing the same amount of people and moving on. These are also games where (unlike for example Bulletstorm) you can't just go trough the main story and win. In order to keep your companions satisfied you'll need to raise very certain stats, do missions for them and defuse situations. To compare that to for example Morrowind - a game where you feel like you most definitely have to grind stats for hours, you can get to Morrowind's ending by taking a few potions from the starting zone and flying there. And then there's of course Mass Effect 3, where you had to repeat online battles in order to keep your rating at 100% and get the "good" ending. | |} ---- 40 man?! I want the 70 man raids revived. I want contested raid content revived. No more of this instanced bullshit. | |} ---- to be honest, if Guild Wars 2 can pull off at least 80 man organized bosses (normally it's 200 or more people that show up), as long as everyone can participate no matter the guild they're in, 70 man open world raid events would be more than possible to pull off. After all Scrotchwing is rarely done by just 20. | |} ---- If enough people want to do it, that would be cool to see return the genre. | |} ---- And to see the rage of so many more players screaming "All the other classes and faction numbers are OP except mine! Nerf naow plz!" in the PvP servers. | |} ---- The good old days. | |} ---- I think you're starting to understand. The key word here is "DIFFERENT". If you keep looking for the perfect game, it will never come along. That doesn't mean that games can't improve what we have now, however. Guildwars 2 wasn't perfect, but it DID take many of the bad themes from modern MMOs and improve them. Questing, crafting, combat, and many of the other core aspects of the MMO genre were taken up a notch. It's a game that's still going strong. Why aren't other, newer MMOs taking that example and improving it? Why does a studio like Carbine, with experience working on WoW, not have the experience, the knowledge, and the skill to do better than carbon copy outdated design theory? Repetitive content, treadmill mechanics, and grind are parts of older, weaker MMOs. That doesn't mean that those need to be the defining aspects of EVERY MMO. | |} ---- I just hope that shift happens soon enough. :( | |} ----